Goal of Al Gore’s Current TV? ‘Compete with MSNBC from the Left’
The left-leaning, JournoList-friendly Politico Website is certainly well-tuned to deliver plenty of news when it comes to Keith Olbermann’s sandbox fight with Al Gore and Joel Hyatt’s Current TV cable channel. But there are a couple of moments in their latest update that are unintentionally hysterically funny for anyone who doesn’t view Gore as “The Goracle” and Olbermann as the one-man savior of cable TV news:
When Al Gore and Joel Hyatt snapped up Keith Olbermann last year following his spectacular exit from MSNBC, they knew what they were getting: a ferociously talented, famously difficult broadcaster with a track record of taking networks to the next level.
But as their relationship with him disintegrated rather publicly over the last six months – to the surprise of absolutely no one in the television business — it became clear that they were getting all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
Olberman’s equity stake in Current and high-falutin title of “chief news officer” came with hopes that he would apply the same Midas touch for talent that turned Rachel Maddow into a household name at MSNBC. But, as the path that led to this past week’s decision to simulcast Bill Press’s radio show showed, the only part of Current programming that Olbermann shaped were the minutes between 8 and 9 p.m.
Instead, the one making the imprint was Current president David Bohrman, the veteran producer who brought the magic wall to CNN and the Imus show to MSNBC. The tense relationship between Olbermann and Bohrman was at the heart of the battle between the channel’s top brass and its biggest star over how to create a 24-hour news channel to compete with MSNBC from the left.
What, they couldn’t simply hook-up a feed to 3CP1 and call it a day?
Ideology is the only reason why someone would want to compete with MSNBC from the left; from a financial and ratings point of view, it’s a disaster. As we noted at the start of 2010, Olbermann was constantly getting crushed in the ratings by Bill O’Reilly:
Back then, the American Thinker’s Stuart Schwartz accurately forecasted the trouble to come for Olbermann, in a brutal piece that, had Olbermann’s future employers at Current ever read it, might have given even them second thoughts:
By the end of 2009, media observers were noting the “abysmal” state of Olbermann’s ratings. And now the thirty-day moving average of ratings shows him steadily sinking as Bill O’Reilly leads the charge of FOX News to the top. The FOX blowout of Keith and friends during the State of the Union this past week prompted National Review to ask, “[A]t what point does MSDNC pull the plug on its all-Left format?”
And so the fat lady is not just singing for Olbermann and MS-NBC: Rather, she is belting out an aria that rushes Katrina-like past the designer finery of Old Media grandees in the audience of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera, rattles the Swarovski crystal chandeliers above their heads, hurtles across Central Park, and pierces the floor-to-ceiling windows of Olbermann’s $4.2-million 40th-floor Trump Palace roost.
It is from here that Olbermann leads the progressive media battle on behalf of America’s downtrodden, joined by neighboring New York Times staffers and mainstream media executives, fighting their self-described war on privilege from foxholes developed by Donald Trump. The various Trump Towers dotting upper Manhattan are, collectively, a progressive Pentagon, headquarters for the media war on Middle America…with Olbermann among the most polished of its brass.
…That is, until America began paying attention. The result: The audience of Countdown has sunk to roughly 20% of FOX News-viewers led by Bill O’Reilly. And now the fat lady is howling her delight as she joins a decades-long string of females in Keith’s life — beginning with his mother, who thought her son needed psychological help — whose fist-bumps will come when he has exited their lives.
Olbermann does not like women, especially attractive and/or accomplished women. Nor is he particularly fond of men. He is forever the awkward, angry teenager of his high school days who mystified psychologists, the überdork whose cruel taunts of the athletes he covered as a sports broadcaster were legendary, even as he yearned to be thought of as the stud that covers studs. Give it up, a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist suggested after watching Olbermann ridicule the appearance of an overweight athlete. He noted that the hefty lefty is “so bloated he looks as if he swallowed Dan Patrick [his ESPN co-anchor] back in 1997.”
And so the venom drips, and the ratings sink. Olbermann is cruel to all who, as a class, have rejected him, such as joyful people and women…or people of faith and women…or people with traditional marriages and women…and those with well-adjusted relationships and women. Did I mention women?
Women are anathema to Olbermann. He delights in demeaning them, and the more attractive or accomplished they are, the more malicious he gets. Conservative Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who relishes her role as policymaker and mother, is a frequent object of his anger; columnist Michelle Malkin is a “big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick” because of her intelligence and traditional values; Sarah Palin is a moronic “Bush in a skirt”; and there’s nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton — who had the nerve to oppose Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries — that a good beating won’t cure.
We’ll get back to the “progressive” talker’s misogyny in a few moments, along with his misanthropy as well. But first, as Howard Kurtz writes, Olbermann’s numbers simply cratered once he moved to Current TV:
Olbermann never came close to the more than 1 million viewers he had averaged at MSNBC, but his Current show was drawing more than 100,000 in the prized 25-to-54 age group last summer—and that gradually dwindled to 30,000.
In the 1980s, Al Gore positioned himself as a sort of centrist figure; his wife Tipper’s PMRC did an end-run around the cultural conservatism of then-President Reagan and the Moral Majority, leading to records with suggestive (read: repulsive) lyrics being stickered with a warning label. That was before Al’s famous Epiphany in the late 1980s, when he decided the Big Money and the chance to really control the masses was on the far left. (Al would later be more than willing to work with the same acts his then-wife had targeted, for his 2007 “Live Earth” anti-global warming carbon-palooza.)
I hope Keith does sue. Because then all the stories of going ons at ESPN & MSNBC will be put in evidence along with the Current ones, as a way of establishing a pattern of behavior that justified his firing.
I hope he sues and wins, and Current TV has to flush $50 mil into Olbermann’s pocket.
Another fun scenario: Olbermann offers to settle and Current refuses.
Wonder if Al Gore is now “The Worst Nobelist in the World”?
What we need here is another call for civility. Wait, that’s only for Republicans.
This feud couldn’t happen to two more deserving people, crazed sex poodle and angry man. Agree with the other commenters, hope there is a law suit.
It’s like watching two cockroaches trying to step on each other.
HAHAHA!
They actually believe this!
Olbermann has been a slow speed train wreck for the past few years – fascinating to watch (and read about) but painfully slow arriving at it’s climax. Seems we’ve about seen the last of him except for the sprinkling of stories that’ll come about as Olbermann files a lawsuit or two against Gore and his network. If ESPN et al are smart they’ll never employ this azzhole for anything other than cleaning commodes.
Gore’s desire to make his network in the image of MSLSD seems foolhardy since a good long look at the bell curve shows there are only so many loons inhabiting the left side of the political bell curve. And besides, I do believe most of them are already engaged on the front lines in the OWS movement. But Al must feel he has to make it big somewhere since his cap and trade scheme seems to have petered out. Having 10′s or 100′s of millions of dollars apparently isn’t enough for The Goracle – he wants to remake himself in the image of Ted Turner – or something like that.
Hey Al – maybe you can market the next enlargement pill for men – ya never know. You’ve always come off as being a bit stiff. Gotta be a marketing angle there somewhere eh?
And the saddest and/or funniest thing, depending on your point of view about this, is that you know somewhere out there in the wilds of Sixth Avenue or areas west of the I-5 in Los Angeles there’s some producer or network exec who is thinking to themselves, “Wow, I’ve got a chance now to get Keith Olbermann!” Keith’s tirades against Bush and others on the right have given him the equivalent of a neverending series of “Get back on TV free” cards.
Showtime and HBO already have been bandied about as possible landing spots – Showtime as a competitor to Bill Maher’s show, and HBO as a companion piece to “Real Time”. The former ignores the point that while Maher may have conservatives on just to treat them like a pinata in a 3-on-1 setting, he does have conservatives on — A “Real Time With Keith Olbermann” show would be 60 minutes of five liberals sitting around agreeing with each other how Nazi-ish conservatives are while buttering up the show’s host. The latter might finally be the bridge too far for even HBO’s liberal execs — not that they don’t love Keith’s views, but turning over 20 percent of their weekly prime-time lineup (including repeat showings) to a bunch of leftist commentary might even strike the folks who green-lighted “Game Change” as not the smartest way to keep people shelling out $10 a month for your service.
Olby’s the least annoying when he’s talking baseball, so his best landing spot might actually be the MLB Network or Sirius/XM’s baseball channel. But he’s damaged his reputation so much with 50 percent of the audience, MLB may not want to deal with that kind of baggage, and while Mel Karmizan has never met a liberal celeb he wasn’t ready to throw satellite radio $$$ at (Rosie, Oprah, etc.), Keith’s ego would probably keep him from stooping to mere words-without-images, unless he got a deal close to what Mel’s giving Howard Stern (including, I presume, use of the Sirius building’s car elevator for Howard, so Olby could get his mouth-duct-taped-shut limo driver to take him right to the door of the studio. Where he’d sooner or later make a snarky remark about Mitt Romney’s new car-elevator equipped luxury home).
Keith O & SCTV’s Julies Caesar- What a PERFECT comparison!!! Eugene Levy could stand in for the Clown any time. That stuff is what comedy should be.
Get your popcorn America, now it starts getting good.
Powder is dry
The only thing “ferociously talented” about KO was his jealousy of everybody else. His mom was right: the boy needed psychological help. In bringing his act to teevee, Olbermann showed the world what goes on inside the brain of a true Lefty – the seething rage at anything and everything, the unbalanced view of humanity Olbermann shares with Chomsky, Alinsky, Ayers and Obama.
It didn’t help matters when Olby smashed his head against a subway door when he rushing to get to a Mets’ game. That certainly made things worse.
Struggling to write words about a guy I could care less about in any sphere. Whoosh,,that was hard.
This whole scenario is laughable. Has anyone in Olbermann’s past ever considered the possibility that he has some serious mental health problems? Anyone foolish enough to employ Olbermann deserves him and his lawsuits.
‘Maybe PJTV or Reason TV should look at going cable to give it a try from the right, though why go technologically backwards?’
– Yes! Please! 2 answer to the “why” question:
1.Money and …
2. Opportunity to dramatically increase your impact on the so called “public discourse.”
Unfortunately, MSNBC has 10 times as much of such impact than all of the “right wing” bloggers taken together. And, Bill O’Reilly is definitely not up to the task of stimulating conservative thinking and motivation in these very interesting times.
The only reason the FOX’s ratings are high is because it’s free in most markets.
Wait ’til they move into airports.
CNN is free in more.
In just what market is cable or sat services “free”? Zero, that’s how many. Next I suppose you suggest the reason why left-wing programing ratings are low is because liberals are to busy being smart to watch TV.
Wonder if misogyny and narcisscism are closely related maladies? The first time I watched Olbermann I saw that combination. Fascinating to watch. Finally got bored of watching and that is very likely why he finally crashed and burned, nobody was watching and narcissistic supply was cut off poor Keith.